PH misses Vienna New Year’s concert

Music is the universal language of mankind.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In an inexplicable cultural oversight, Filipinos celebrated the arrival of 2014 missing the world’s most famous classical music event—the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert at Musikverein, a building that resembles an ancient Greek temple.

Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim led the traditional concert, sending a message of peace and celebrating life as the centennial of World War I approaches.

The Musikverein, Austria’s monumental music hall, was decorated with thousands of roses from San Remo.

Barenboim was conducting the world’s most televised concert for the second time since 2009.

One of the world’s famous maestros, he has been music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Staatskapelle, as well as chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris.

Barenboim has joined the ranks of great maestros who have conducted the New Year’s Concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic—like Herbert von Karajan, Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado, Zubin Mehta and Riccardo Muti, whose CDs I have collected over the years.

In a country reputed to be home to music lovers—like the Philippines—one can imagine the sense of frustration over our failure to tune in to the live radio-TV recordings of the 2014 New Year’s performance due to our lack of access to a broadcast heard by millions of people in over 80 countries around the globe.

We were not one of them.

We have been excluded from the loop of enjoying the sound of music from one of the world’s most spiritually soaring orchestral performances because of the exclusionary commercial policies of our private radio and TV networks, not to the mention government-owned facility, emasculating the cultural contents of their programs.

The result of this commerce-driven policy has been to open the floodgates for the entry into our entertainment media of “telenovela” films from Korea, which became the cultural staple of New Year’s Day 2014 programs.

Barenboim selected the “Friedenspalmen” (Palms of Peace) waltz by Josef Strauss as the central theme of this year’s program to mark the centennial of the Great War that broke out in 1914 and killed millions across Europe over the next four years.

Strauss’s Palms of Peace was composed to mark the bloody 1866 Battle of Koniggratz between Prussia and the Austrian Empire.

The concert was also a reminder that the New Year’s Day Concert tradition started in 1939, a bleak period for Austria and Europe, when Nazi Gemany annexed Austria as part of the Third Reich.

The concert incorporated pieces from the works of the Strauss family (Johann I, Johann II and Josef and Eduard). According to reports of the concert, the orchestra played the younger Johann’s “Egyptian March” to recognize Barenboim’s efforts to promote peace in the Middle East.

The orchestra closed with the traditional playing of Strauss’s “Radetzky March,” accompanied by the audience’s clapping.

The first concert was on Dec. 31, 1939, after the Anschluss, the political union between Austria and Germany under Hitler. Several of the Vienna Philharmonic members were Jewish and were arrested.

By having concerts of all-Strauss music during the war, some observers saw the concerts as an expression of Viennese individuality.

The first broadcast of the New Year’s celebration was in 1959. Since then, there has been an annual broadcast on public television in most countries.

According to the Encyclopedia of Music, “music is intimately bound up with important events in all our lives … There can hardly be anyone who is not moved by any kind of music.”

Music, it says, “covers the whole gamut of human emotions. It can make us feel happy or sad, nostalgic or energetic, and some music is capable of overtaking the mind until it is oblivious to all else.”